Seriously, how often do you use the optical drives? Do you sit swapping discs day in and day out? I know that I use mine about once a month.
And the front ports are not hidden behind the door.
IMHO drives are about the ugliest thing about modern computers, and I like how the Mac Mini toned it down to a simple discrete slot. I'd happily hide my optical/whatever drives behind a door.
I agree totally. One can make a system as bullet-proof as possible, but if you give the user even a remote chance of shooting himself in the head (metaphorically) at least one will do exactly that.
Really, the only way to make computers "safe" (whatever the hell that entails) is to not let people use them.
I do my tech-supporting for friends and family totally free, albeit somewhat grumpily. I do tech-support for other people too, and whenever I get a new client (this happens about once a month) I always reply with the same response to their payment-question:
You pay what you feel it's worth. If it wasn't worth much, then don't pay much. If it was worth a lot to you, then pay a lot.
Of course there are people who abuse this system (the kind that asks me to spend four-five hours fixing their shit, then pay me bupkus), and usually I start ignoring them pretty quickly.
The others that understand the system I keep going to and checking up on, and whatever they pay me is fine, as long as they pay what it was worth to them.
I've gotten everything from a free dinner for a 10-minute job, all the way up to US$500 for 3-4 hours of work.
Interesting that you should mention this, since I'm re-reading Hackers for the umpteenth time right now.
And although Peter Samson did create the first piece of digital music I still cannot call it a catchy tune:)
I quote from the book: "When outsiders heard the melodies of Johann Sebastian Bach in a single-voice, monophonic square wave, no harmony, they were universally unfazed."
And I'd probably have been unfazed too, but at the same time I can totally understand those old-school hackers and their lust for neat tricks. I've done similarly weird things in my days (such as putting a VT-100 in my kitchen)
I've actually had the good luck to have tried playing a Theremin. It's not an original one, but one of the Moog-manufactured from the late 70's.
It's a really fun instrument to fiddle with, but I can really respect the people who play it live, it's really tricky to get certain things right with it.
Just playing around is fine, but precise orchestration requires a helluva concentration and motor-skills.
So you're answer is that he bring his own multibutton mouse to work so that he can carry it around and plug it into a Mac when he has to use one?
That's what I do. I bought myself a Logitech MX510 simply so I could keep it at work and use it with the G5 that I work on. My employers are all musicians/AV-guys and have a very low regard for ergonomics, they figure that if the "Pro" mouse is good enough for them, it's good enough for everyone.
Me, I've seen the light and prefer an actual workable mouse.
Anyhoo... I'd take a 512k Mac any day over a CGA-equipped IBM-computer. Have you ever actually seen a CGA display? It' ain't pretty. Very blocky, low-resolution with only four colors. I'd prefer a nice, crisp, relatively high-res B&W display any old day.
Same goes for the NeXT-slab. I'd take a crisp B&W slab over the EGA-nonsense from IBM. EGA was an improvement over CGA, but it still couldn't shake a stick at NeXT.
Incidentally, I'm now going to fire up my NeXT-slab (color) that's standing right next here and have a nostalgic moment.
after Apple decided against Johnlouis Gasse's BeOS.
I know I'm nitpicking, but his name is Jean-Louis Gassé.
He's french, and he also used to work at Apple. He's responsible for the Mac II, and mainly he made sure that Macs were evolving after Jobs got canned. He added expansion capabilities, color, extended keyboards, etc.
Personally I get big-time conspiracy vibes from this thing.
Sure, **AA wants to purge illegal digital files. Yada yada yada. Bla bla bla.
But we have to remember that there's a lot of LEGAL digital music out there, where the artists encourage downloading their work in order to spread it. Oftentimes these artists are of superior quality compared to the one-hit wonders designed to steal your money and put it in the pockets of recording-industry execs.
Perhaps **AA is seeing the "amateurs" that produce higher-quality work as a threat, and this is their subtle attempt to make those musicians hurt by essentially lying and claiming that those files also are "illegal"?
Here in Sweden this is commonplace. You can get 8mbits/1mbits from the Telco, pricetag about US$56/month. No download cap, no upload cap. You can get 24mbits/3mbits as well, but I'm too lazy to check the price on that.
Then there's several other companies offering DSL with various merits as well as prices.
Me, I'm happy with my fiber-LAN hookup. 10/10, no caps whatsoever, and five IP-adresses to use for whatever purpose I want. Price about US$40/month. If I want to I can get 100/100 for about US$80/month.
And yes, I know that we who live in Sweden are totally spoiled with broadband.
Ericsson (you know, the people who makes cell-phones and other related items, before they merged with Sony) a few years back was doing really badly and losing tons of money. So they fired a whole bunch of people (5000+ emplyees got the axe) and suspended any christmas perks for the employees because they were losing millions on a daily basis. No corporate christmas dinners, no corporate gifts.
This of course didn't apply to the people in charge. They gave themselves a fat bonus for being so awesome! I guess some people are created more equal than others.
My bad, I was going for a sound-quality comparison. Not an amplifier-comparison.
A somewhat crunchy 128kbits MP3 playing through an iPod can't really compare with a Linn played through some weird and wonderful tube-based amplifier. But then again, an iPod with a decent set of headphones isn't quite as expensive as the above mentioned rig.
I should've been a little more clear about this. I'll blame it on sleep-deprevation. Apologies.
Dude, that doesn't apply to the rotary in my bedroom. Hell, that thing deforms just if someone looks a bit heavy on it.
It's a rotary, but it's the El Cheapo-kind that was made in the 70's. It used to belong to my parents; they got it from the telco when they got their first phoneline back in the mid-to-late 70's.
I keep it in my bedroom because it's an excellent phone to answer when someone calls me and wakes me up. It's got a nice fuzzy distortion in the speaker and it always makes me sound pissed-off (even if I'm not angry, excellent för telemarketers).
It's completely useless to dial out with though, since I've got VoIP since may '03. But it works fine for answering calls.
My 4th gen iPod does an excellent job driving my Beyerdynamic DT880's. Hell, it even makes my head rumble from the bass, and the sound is completely acceptable. Not quite up to par with, say, a Linn LP-12 but none the less I feel that the iPod provides decent sound.
Although I wouldn't be caught wearing the DT880's in public since they make you look like a total dork.
PATA/SATA disk are still lagging horribly behind stuff like SCSI disks and their 10k RPM offerings.
There's the Western Digital Raptor which is 10k RPM SATA-drive, but apart from that the pickings are very slim. It's also a rather expensive drive (albeit cheap compared to SCSI).
But I agree, IDE/SATA-drives need a boost in their speed. Storage is fine, but speed is lacking. I mean my old Sun Ultra-30 from 1998 has 15k RPM-drives! SCSI of course.
Err, up here in Sweden we're bombarded by MS-FUD about how they "lead the technology revolution" and how they "constantly strive to improve technology for mankind" and BLA BLA BLA BLA BULLSHIT BULLSHIT etc etc.
The scary thing really is that it's not so much commercials as propaganda, since they never make any advertising for a product, they just claim that they're awesome and everyone loves them.
Mike Rowe attracted the wrath of Microsoft due to his parents giving him that name. He wasn't spreading secrets about the new products from Microsoft, he was simply trying to run a business.
If Mike Rowe had been running a website displaying unreleased Microsoft-products then yes, I could see some kind of connection. Seeing as he wasn't, then I don't really see any connection other than the parallell of a huge corporation stepping on some guy (which isn't exactly unique)
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have research to prove it?
Because Microsoft says so.
Seriously, how often do you use the optical drives? Do you sit swapping discs day in and day out? I know that I use mine about once a month.
And the front ports are not hidden behind the door.
IMHO drives are about the ugliest thing about modern computers, and I like how the Mac Mini toned it down to a simple discrete slot. I'd happily hide my optical/whatever drives behind a door.
why woud a firefox user ever use RSS via myYahoo? It's already built into my browser, I don't need a protal for it.
You could use a spellchecker though. Pity that Yahoo doesn't provide such an item.
I agree totally. One can make a system as bullet-proof as possible, but if you give the user even a remote chance of shooting himself in the head (metaphorically) at least one will do exactly that.
Really, the only way to make computers "safe" (whatever the hell that entails) is to not let people use them.
The new Antec P-180
Yes, the topic describes my system perfectly.
I do my tech-supporting for friends and family totally free, albeit somewhat grumpily. I do tech-support for other people too, and whenever I get a new client (this happens about once a month) I always reply with the same response to their payment-question:
You pay what you feel it's worth. If it wasn't worth much, then don't pay much. If it was worth a lot to you, then pay a lot.
Of course there are people who abuse this system (the kind that asks me to spend four-five hours fixing their shit, then pay me bupkus), and usually I start ignoring them pretty quickly.
The others that understand the system I keep going to and checking up on, and whatever they pay me is fine, as long as they pay what it was worth to them.
I've gotten everything from a free dinner for a 10-minute job, all the way up to US$500 for 3-4 hours of work.
Interesting that you should mention this, since I'm re-reading Hackers for the umpteenth time right now.
:)
And although Peter Samson did create the first piece of digital music I still cannot call it a catchy tune
I quote from the book: "When outsiders heard the melodies of Johann Sebastian Bach in a single-voice, monophonic square wave, no harmony, they were universally unfazed."
And I'd probably have been unfazed too, but at the same time I can totally understand those old-school hackers and their lust for neat tricks. I've done similarly weird things in my days (such as putting a VT-100 in my kitchen)
I've actually had the good luck to have tried playing a Theremin. It's not an original one, but one of the Moog-manufactured from the late 70's.
It's a really fun instrument to fiddle with, but I can really respect the people who play it live, it's really tricky to get certain things right with it.
Just playing around is fine, but precise orchestration requires a helluva concentration and motor-skills.
So you're answer is that he bring his own multibutton mouse to work so that he can carry it around and plug it into a Mac when he has to use one?
That's what I do. I bought myself a Logitech MX510 simply so I could keep it at work and use it with the G5 that I work on. My employers are all musicians/AV-guys and have a very low regard for ergonomics, they figure that if the "Pro" mouse is good enough for them, it's good enough for everyone.
Me, I've seen the light and prefer an actual workable mouse.
Wow, I'm actually replying to a troll/flamebait.
Anyhoo... I'd take a 512k Mac any day over a CGA-equipped IBM-computer. Have you ever actually seen a CGA display? It' ain't pretty. Very blocky, low-resolution with only four colors. I'd prefer a nice, crisp, relatively high-res B&W display any old day.
Same goes for the NeXT-slab. I'd take a crisp B&W slab over the EGA-nonsense from IBM. EGA was an improvement over CGA, but it still couldn't shake a stick at NeXT.
Incidentally, I'm now going to fire up my NeXT-slab (color) that's standing right next here and have a nostalgic moment.
after Apple decided against Johnlouis Gasse's BeOS.
I know I'm nitpicking, but his name is Jean-Louis Gassé.
He's french, and he also used to work at Apple. He's responsible for the Mac II, and mainly he made sure that Macs were evolving after Jobs got canned. He added expansion capabilities, color, extended keyboards, etc.
Personally I get big-time conspiracy vibes from this thing.
Sure, **AA wants to purge illegal digital files. Yada yada yada. Bla bla bla.
But we have to remember that there's a lot of LEGAL digital music out there, where the artists encourage downloading their work in order to spread it. Oftentimes these artists are of superior quality compared to the one-hit wonders designed to steal your money and put it in the pockets of recording-industry execs.
Perhaps **AA is seeing the "amateurs" that produce higher-quality work as a threat, and this is their subtle attempt to make those musicians hurt by essentially lying and claiming that those files also are "illegal"?
Here in Sweden this is commonplace. You can get 8mbits/1mbits from the Telco, pricetag about US$56/month. No download cap, no upload cap. You can get 24mbits/3mbits as well, but I'm too lazy to check the price on that.
Then there's several other companies offering DSL with various merits as well as prices.
Me, I'm happy with my fiber-LAN hookup. 10/10, no caps whatsoever, and five IP-adresses to use for whatever purpose I want. Price about US$40/month. If I want to I can get 100/100 for about US$80/month.
And yes, I know that we who live in Sweden are totally spoiled with broadband.
... of another similar thing.
Ericsson (you know, the people who makes cell-phones and other related items, before they merged with Sony) a few years back was doing really badly and losing tons of money. So they fired a whole bunch of people (5000+ emplyees got the axe) and suspended any christmas perks for the employees because they were losing millions on a daily basis. No corporate christmas dinners, no corporate gifts.
This of course didn't apply to the people in charge. They gave themselves a fat bonus for being so awesome! I guess some people are created more equal than others.
this is like a tinfoil-hat convention!
My bad, I was going for a sound-quality comparison. Not an amplifier-comparison.
A somewhat crunchy 128kbits MP3 playing through an iPod can't really compare with a Linn played through some weird and wonderful tube-based amplifier. But then again, an iPod with a decent set of headphones isn't quite as expensive as the above mentioned rig.
I should've been a little more clear about this. I'll blame it on sleep-deprevation. Apologies.
Dude, that doesn't apply to the rotary in my bedroom. Hell, that thing deforms just if someone looks a bit heavy on it.
It's a rotary, but it's the El Cheapo-kind that was made in the 70's. It used to belong to my parents; they got it from the telco when they got their first phoneline back in the mid-to-late 70's.
I keep it in my bedroom because it's an excellent phone to answer when someone calls me and wakes me up. It's got a nice fuzzy distortion in the speaker and it always makes me sound pissed-off (even if I'm not angry, excellent för telemarketers).
It's completely useless to dial out with though, since I've got VoIP since may '03. But it works fine for answering calls.
My 4th gen iPod does an excellent job driving my Beyerdynamic DT880's. Hell, it even makes my head rumble from the bass, and the sound is completely acceptable. Not quite up to par with, say, a Linn LP-12 but none the less I feel that the iPod provides decent sound.
Although I wouldn't be caught wearing the DT880's in public since they make you look like a total dork.
What application do you run that an ordinary, garden variety disk drive cannot keep up with?
Microsoft Windows.
PATA/SATA disk are still lagging horribly behind stuff like SCSI disks and their 10k RPM offerings.
There's the Western Digital Raptor which is 10k RPM SATA-drive, but apart from that the pickings are very slim. It's also a rather expensive drive (albeit cheap compared to SCSI).
But I agree, IDE/SATA-drives need a boost in their speed. Storage is fine, but speed is lacking. I mean my old Sun Ultra-30 from 1998 has 15k RPM-drives! SCSI of course.
Err, up here in Sweden we're bombarded by MS-FUD about how they "lead the technology revolution" and how they "constantly strive to improve technology for mankind" and BLA BLA BLA BLA BULLSHIT BULLSHIT etc etc.
The scary thing really is that it's not so much commercials as propaganda, since they never make any advertising for a product, they just claim that they're awesome and everyone loves them.
It's probably one of the reasons why so many people like him. (Cue the overlord jokes.)
I for one welcome our new finnish kernel-hacking overlord(s).
Why is that?
Mike Rowe attracted the wrath of Microsoft due to his parents giving him that name. He wasn't spreading secrets about the new products from Microsoft, he was simply trying to run a business.
If Mike Rowe had been running a website displaying unreleased Microsoft-products then yes, I could see some kind of connection. Seeing as he wasn't, then I don't really see any connection other than the parallell of a huge corporation stepping on some guy (which isn't exactly unique)
I played a lot of Thief 3 this spring. I started getting to the point where I'd check the surroundings for a nice shadowy place to hide.
Also I'd get very startled by sudden noises, and sometimes I would narrate (in my head) what I was doing.
Amen to that.
Also, they bought Giant Antispyware, and christ on a crutch does that thing do a hell of a lot of false-positives.
I rennamed a textfile something like claria.exe and that thing started screaming immediately that bad people were trying to take over my life.
So seriously, I couldn't care less.